It’s no secret that Magic: The Gathering’s Universes Beyond franchise has been incredibly successful. Creating $200,000,000 in sales with the Final Fantasy crossover on release day alone, this is a monetary mogul for Hasbro. As such, travelling to other popular IPs will be a common sight for MTG going forward. Players do seem to love these crossovers, but they won’t be the same as a pure in-universe MTG set.
Some of the core aspects of the Magic: The Gathering experience are those reserved for in-universe Magic sets. The most obvious of these is the Planeswalker. These powerful cards notably do not make an appearance in Universes Beyond sets, as they are something core to Magic, and Magic alone. Despite this exclusivity, the number of Planeswalkers in sets has been limited since 2023.
Now, it looks like we’re finally coming to the end of this period. According to MTG’s Head Designer, Mark Rosewater, more Planeswalkers are coming in the future thanks to Universes Beyond.
An Influx of Planeswalkers Confirmed
“xx-xobet-xx: Since Universes Beyond sets don’t usually have Planeswalkers or Planeswalker support, will we get more of those cards on average in Universes Within sets to compensate?”
Mark Rosewater: Yes.”
Mark Rosewater
There’s a lot to love about Planeswalkers in Magic: The Gathering. For starters, Planeswalkers tend to be a lot more complex than regular MTG cards, allowing for interesting gameplay opportunities. Typically boasting three or more abilities, these cards are true value engines that can massively impact competitive formats.
Beyond this, since their introduction, Planeswalkers have always just felt special. Since they’re such a departure from regular creatures, players take notice whenever a new or returning Planeswalker is revealed. These cards are perfect for showing off an iconic or main character in a story, and are often treated with reverence accordingly.
Despite all these great features, Wizards definitely made too many Planeswalkers for a while, diluting how special they felt. After 2023’s Phyrexia: All Will Be One had ten unique Planeswalkers, this issue was pushed to its breaking point. Thankfully, Wizards did have a pre-planned change in store, as many Planeswalkers were desparked, and their frequency reduced.
Nowadays, we mostly only get one Planeswalker per Standard legal MTG set. This worked great in past years; however, now Universes Beyond is crowding the calendar. Since Planeswalkers don’t appear in these crossover sets, it seemed this iconic Magic element was being pushed out of the spotlight. This led MTG players to turn to Mark Rosewater to question if Wizards was aware of this problem.
Thankfully, Rosewater had a very emphatic answer to this problem. With a clear-cut “Yes” in response to xx-xobet-xx, we now know we’re getting more Planeswalkers per set in the future. In fact, this shift already seems to have begun.
Discrepancies Have Already Happened
While this is a rather open-ended answer, it most likely suggests that we’ll be getting more than one Planeswalker in the average future in-universe sets. Edge of Eternities only had one Planeswalker, but Tarkir: Dragonstorm notably included two different Planeswalkers, as did Aetherdrift.
Rosewater had already mentioned that the old 1 Planeswalker per set rule was being overturned, and we’re already seeing that in action with multiple in-universe sets from 2025. That said, not every Planeswalker that appears in a story may be represented, which suggests that Wizards of the Coast still wants to keep a smaller limit on what cards are being included in new MTG sets.
This might be the new norm for Planeswalkers for MTG, but there’s still a big drop in Planeswalkers between 2024 and 2025. We saw seven new Standard-legal Planeswalkers in 2024, two of which appeared in MTG Foundations. If you include the Flip-Walkers from Modern Horizons 3, that number ticks up to twelve. This suggests there could be a lot of room to cover for Wizards of the Coast in 2026.
So, when will we next see a large batch of Planeswalkers? It’s impossible to know for sure, but they might be coming to MTG sooner than we expect.
The Origin of Planeswalkers is Returning
The next in-universe MTG set is Lorwyn Eclipsed; a set that was originally supposed to release in 2025, but ended up getting pushed to early 2026. Many players have been asking to return to this iconic MTG setting since it first appeared back in 2007.
This could mean something particularly special for Planeswalkers for a few reasons. Not only does Lorwyn Eclipsed depict the beginning of a new story arc, but it’s also where Planeswalkers originated 18 years ago.
Lorwyn was the set that introduced Planeswalkers to MTG, with five different Planeswalkers, one for each color, arriving in the game for the first time. While the cards haven’t really stood the test of time, many of these characters, like Liliana Vess, Chandra Nalaar, Jace Beleren, and Ajani Goldmane, remain some of the most popular and important characters in the MTG IP. Only poor Garruk seems to have become more irrelevant as time passed.
While we would be surprised to see five Planeswalkers appear in Lorwyn Eclipsed, there’s a decent chance that we’ll see more than one. Which Planeswalkers are impossible to know for sure, however, since we really don’t know where the story will pick up. Edge of Eternities was largely unrelated to the new story arc, and the end of Tarkir: Dragonstorm doesn’t exactly shine a lot of light on where things might kick off, either.
It’s impossible to know how many Planeswalkers we’ll see in 2026, but I would expect more than we saw in 2025. Universes Beyond truly kicked off this year, and as a result, there were a lot of unplanned growing pains. The licensing drama surrounding MTG Spider-Man is a prime example.
So, now that the concept has been solidified, there should be a lot more room for awesome in-universe Planeswalkers to make an appearance. From Rosewater’s response, it’s fair to say that players should be expecting more than three Planeswalkers in 2026, but how many we’ll actually see is impossible to know.
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